If you were in downtown Salt Lake City today, you may have noticed a large rally of over a thousand peacefully protesting polygamists. What is happening to the financial affairs of the FLDS right now seems completely inexplicable, but I need to try to understand what is going on. And it seems to me to behoove every citizen of the United States to do the same. Continue reading…
The tragedy of 9/11 had a big impact on my views about the relationship between faith and reason. As I watched the video footage of the jumbo jets flying into the World Trade Center towers over and over again, it dawned on me that I was witnessing the destructive power of faith unchecked by reason. Consider for a moment the faith proposition that motivated the 9/11 hijackers: “If you slit a few throats to hijack a plane and then fly that plane into a skyscraper, killing yourself and all your comrades along with thousands of civilian men, women, and children, then God will reward you in Heaven with 72 virgins who will provide you more sensual delights than you could ever have hoped to enjoy during mortality.” Viewing the fruits of the hijackers’ faith — the twisted steel and endless ash, the homemade “Missing” flyers plastered everywhere, the sobbing relatives of the victims — I couldn’t help wishing the hijackers would have run that faith proposition through the wringer of reason before deciding to act upon it.
Faith needs reason because faith unchecked by reason can be just as deadly as reason unchecked by faith proved to be in the gulags of Soviet Russia, the Cultural Revolutions of Maoist China, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. (Would Stalin, Mao, and Pot have ordered the killings of millions if they had had faith in an afterlife and final judgment?)
We Mormons are certainly not immune to the potential dangers of unquestioning faith. Continue reading…
While I was much more than casually aware of church history previously, since becoming president of the church I have engaged in an extensive study of our story. I have explored books and articles from a wide spectrum of scholars, authors, and publishers, ranging from the faithful to the skeptical and in between. Truth has nothing to fear from scrutiny.
Continue reading…
Are teens who practice polygamy devout or brainwashed? Are teen terrorists devout or brainwashed? When is a teen old enough to be held accountable for crimes, but not old enough to make his or her own life decisions? Continue reading…
According to the Utah Catholic bishop, John Wester, the Vatican has issued a directive to not release parish records to LDS researchers (who then use them to perform vicarious ordinances. As I understand it, these records have been a major source of names for LDS temple work.
What impact will this decision have on LDS temple work? Slow it down? Eventually force temple patrons to bring their own names every time they go to the temple (like was standard practice a century ago)? Jewish groups acting on behalf of Holocaust victims were the first group to stir controversy about this, now the Vatican. The issue is not just the revulsion of these entities at LDS proxy work, but also the increased visibility this gives the practice of LDS temple work every time one of these news stories break. How long will it be before other groups follow this trend and shut down access? What kind of a “backlog” of temple-ready names exists to keep temple work going should the world tell us to leave their ancestors alone?
And how would you feel if the FLDS, say, began doing temple work for YOUR grandparents? Speaking of the FLDS, the Texas appeals court has just ruled the state had no right to seize FLDS children…Discuss either topic!
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